Participant Perspective: Looking Back at the TAUS Asia Conference

TAUS Asia Conference returned to Beijing in March, and welcomed business leaders and academics from across the Asia Pacific region. The event focused on major developments within machine translation (MT) and machine learning (ML), and how these innovations can help Chinese businesses engage with a global audience. The annual event also championed innovation in the language services industry and the development of certain translation technologies.

The event, which took place at the Beijing Language and Culture University, included buyers, providers of language services and technologies, as well as industry experts and academic researchers. MT experts from companies including SDL, Alibaba, Google, Baidu, and VMware attended (as well as experts from local universities), and offered their insights on cutting-edge MT technologies, industry best practices in localization and the latest applications of MT.

SDL’s CEO, Adolfo Hernandez, also took to the stage and spoke about the future of content and the role that AI and Machine Learning will play in creating, managing and delivering content at scale. His keynote explored the proliferation of content, and how it has become one of the biggest challenges facing businesses. He gave the example of translating one piece of content into 8 languages (for 5 different channels), and how this would turn into 280 pieces of related content.

Creating, and managing this amount of content is one thing – but with endless waves of content rolling in Hernandez rightly pointed out the many security risks. Especially when you consider that 3,529 records are stolen every minute, according to Hernandez.

Hernandez believes that AI and ML will be the best ways to deal with these security risks. And in the future, technical innovation in AI and ML – built upon the foundation of existing content – will automate content creation and delivery, and improve business agility. As Hernandez argued, in the near future – content could be your best salesperson.